Ali Smith invents new forms of fiction in the interstices between parts of a sentence – commenting "but the thing I particularly like about the word but … is that it always takes you off to the side …" The story is about a man who leaves a tedious dinner party, locks himself into a bedroom and refuses to leave.
We found this beauty of a gem online for $729.99, so it's no bargain, but for a respectable woman of means, there's no reason the gun that she pulls out of her vagina to settle an argument about aliens or end a tedious dinner party conversations shouldn't be every bit as classy as the rest of her outfit.
Political fare Rubber chicken circuit: the round of tedious dinners with constituency activists which all ambitious Tory MPs must complete to become popular with 'the grass roots'.
My memory of the Peace Prize announcement last Friday sits on a little shelf in my mind right next to my memory of an otherwise tedious holiday dinner at which a cat, hidden beneath the table, suddenly clawed one of my great aunts.
All the tedious state dinners, the pomp, I could do without them.
Our president is stuck with too many ceremonial duties as head of state, such as greeting ambassadors and holding tedious state dinners, that divert attention from solving problems.
Everyone's too busy talking at once, loudest of all being Grandma in the midst of recalling the shore dinner in tedious detail: "For six bucks you'd get a shrimp cocktail, clam chowder, a green salad with sliced tomato and onion".
He quickens people as he quickens pieces, not by making everything "interesting," which itself is tedious, the philosophy of dinner parties, but more radically, by penetrating the thick crusts of convention that form around art and emotion and sweeping them away, so that his listener, his interlocutor, is left on a higher plane, and with the memory of a revelation, large or small.
But that is perhaps fitting for the subject: watching this solemn, painstaking examination of immigrants' roots is a little like trying to pry juicy family stories from an elderly aunt at Thanksgiving dinner: There are some tedious detours and false starts, but the unexpected details and touching sidebars are worth the effort.
And not only to stuffy black-tie functions with their back-slapping speeches, but to semi-formal corporate celebratory dinners, and to the endless glut of tedious award ceremonies, where gongs are mysteriously given to the companies who pre-booked the most chicken dinners.
The news was an excuse to finish with the dinner, which all of us were finding tedious.
